Mark Berman

And it's just amazing that being randomly assigned to the room that had the modest nature view could speed recovery and also cause people to use less pain medication.

Roger was really interested also in stress and stress responses.

So he believed that interactions with nature could remediate stress responses.

And he thought that was the mechanism behind why interacting with nature was having different beneficial effects.

So the biophilia hypothesis in a nutshell is this idea that humans have an inherent love of nature and the natural world and other living organisms.

And these tend to be places that we would say would be very good habitats for humans to live in.

And there was actually a researcher

Jay Appleton, who proposed this other theory called prospect-refuge theory, that environments that had high prospect, meaning places where you could draw food and water, but also that had high refuge, places where you could kind of hide and be safe, would be the most kind of preferred environments.

And that also kind of matches this idea of humans kind of liking natural environments that have

Well, a lot of plants and trees, but also water.

Yeah, so Steve coined or developed this hypothesis called the attention restoration theory.

And he did this in partnership with his wife, Rachel Kaplan.

And one of the main tenants of attention restoration theory is that humans have two main kinds of attention.

And one kind of attention is called directed attention.

And that's the kind of attention where you as the individual person are deciding what to pay attention to.

So presumably...

anybody listening to this show is deciding to pay attention to what we're talking about.

And this directed attention is the kind of attention that we use a lot in schools and at work.

It's thought to be fatigable or depletable, that you can only sort of direct your attention for so long before you become mentally fatigued and you can't really focus anymore.

And we've all had that sensation kind of at the end of a long workday where you might be just staring at the computer screen and nothing's really happening and you just can't focus or concentrate to get your work done.